


Let Your Walls Fall Down

by Zigzagwanderer



Series: Where I Don't Feel Alone [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Fingering, Angst, Arguing, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren Fluff, Blow Jobs, Canon Divergence, Denial of Feelings, Did I Mention Angst?, Dirty Talk, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Smut, Falling In Love, Force Choking (Star Wars), Force gems as love tokens, Happy Ending, Insecurity, Jealousy, Kylo is inexperienced, Kylux - Freeform, Making Up, Mention of interrogation, Mutual Masturbation, Mutual Pining, Naked Ren, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Plotting, Porn, Porn with Feelings, Possessive Behavior, Protective Kylo Ren, Ren Kills His Rival, Resolved Sexual Tension, Secret Relationship, Separations, Snoke is a psychotic bully, Substance Abuse, Then They Masturbate, Treason, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Weird murderous architectural stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-01-06 04:52:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 7,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18381338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: Snoke has ordered Hux to help Ren build himself a symbolic palace on a conquered planet. They both suspect that Snoke simply wants them to fight over the project, perhaps even to the death. But, as their feelings for one another are exposed by their time alone, events begin to turn out differently.Finally posted the last bit of this!!!!!!! Thank you to anyone who has read this!!! I always appreciate it!!!!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Boysnextdoor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boysnextdoor/gifts).



The uninhabited island is unsullied by the war. 

It is isolated. Immaculate. Hux winces at this, because he has been unable to tell Ren that, to him, shyness and scars do not matter. 

He snaps the shuttle sideways, into the clearing, and looks up, wearily, into the sky. The colours are immodest; dirty golds and raw, ripening reds. 

He would much prefer to be looking down, with the uncertainty of the infinite at his back, instead of more nebulously before him, coalescing, as it surely will, into that tall, black-masked shape. 

He puts a shot of stimulant straight into his bloodstream and forces himself to open up. 

The odd, dewy scents, the nectars and saps, trickle along the tight steel throat of the ship. 

It is dawn, apparently, on this part of the planet. 

“Your reluctance to accompany me here has lost us _yesterday_.” Ren is a shadow against shadows. “Now we are forced to wait for _today_.”

He is over by some kind of low, sullen fire, set in front of some kind of shelter. A winged serpent scuds away through the canopy, screeching, as Hux stumbles slightly, towards the tree-line. What he would not give to crawl, gratefully, into the makeshift camp-bed. Into Ren’s arms. 

“The delays to my departure were entirely necessary,” he asserts, instead, turning up the collar on his greatcoat. If Hux shivers, it is because of the cold, the heat, the light, the lack of light. 

It is because of _anything_ , but _that_ voice. Saying ‘us’, and ‘we’. 

In his deepest deliriums, Hux has Ren say so much more.

“I have duties, not…distractions. And the surveying droids function admirably in any…” 

“No, General.” Ren stands, barefoot and uncloaked. His hair is knotted like the vines above, tied up but with tendrils that fall, damply, around his face. “Our Leader’s will was made clear in this,” Ren scowls. “You are to give me _your_ eyes. _Your_ hands.” 

There is a long silence, then. 

Hux can taste Ren so plainly, in the unprocessed air. Woodsmoke on his clothing, and fruit, and the unwashed parts of him; the sweat from under his arms and the musk from between his legs. 

“Well, my lord,” Hux replies, eventually, with a pretence of resentment. “It seems that you have me.”

He sits down upon a crate. Taps his polished boot, out of all rhythm. Takes out his screen and hides within his own indispensability.

He is occupied by duties. Not distractions. And certainly never _dreams_. 

The single sun slowly strips away the mist. 

Hux relays orders. Chides his staff, remotely.

He does not watch Ren swallow down water and wipe his mouth, boyishly, with the back of his hand. He does not watch Ren hang up his thin blanket, body lengthening as he stretches, a white sliver of temptation showing where his tunic gapes. And he does not watch Ren watch him, eventually, fists clenching, as he is once again ignored, _disdained._

In the end, Ren stalks off into the forest, scything through the deeper wilderness with his wizard’s weapon. 

Hux powers off his screen; his shield, his miserable martyrdom. He takes out his flask and drinks.

He had better finish this foolishness swiftly, before his courage, his _heart_ , is found. 

And all is lost.


	2. Chapter 2

The meadow of Snoke’s choosing, is, of course, hardly suitable for construction. 

The multiple moons no doubt bring coastal inundations. Besides the cresting dunes of crystal it is unsheltered, and, more importantly to the General, it is therefore _undefendable_. 

With an ease born of practise, Hux sublimates his fury. Only now, the rage which cannot be spent on the _master_ , is no longer diverted towards the _apprentice_. 

Far from it. 

Hux folds up his shirtsleeves and unlocks his quaint, manual kit. He is uncomfortably pleased to have known that Ren would favour the use of such relics. Out of all of the Order, Hux is surely the only one who recognises the romantic, beneath the mask of the enforcer. 

Lizards swoop and sing, spearing their prey up from the nearby shallows with gossamer grace. Myriad insects hum as they flutter, gem-like, among the open shimmer of a thousand flower-heads. 

Hux longs to annihilate it all, to give Ren a proper place of peace. 

He selects a stylus. A lifetime ago, at the Academy, there was once an innocent clarity to be had, in calculations and elevations. 

And the problem is an old problem; which stone where? 

And where the next? 

The bold star above blazes on. 

Hux is sighting along his markers to measure something for the third time, when Ren comes bristling through the salt-grass, striding back from the beach.

“Hux…” Ren halts suddenly, in his crashing and lumbering. “You…” 

Irritated by an inaccuracy he has scratched upon his scrolls, Hux rubs the perspiration from his hairline and stoops to recalibrate, squinting along the criss-cross of laser-lines. 

“I am _honoured_ by your presence, my lord,” Hux gripes, absently, loosening another fastening, and fussily untucking his shirttails. “If you have quite finished your meditations, there are details to determine in the building of your _grand palace_.” 

Then the General, too, stops.

He has turned around and he and Ren look at one another. 

“I do not deserve a palace.” Ren says quietly. He is staring at Hux’s revealed forearms. His naked throat. His General’s high colour and gloriously dishevelled hair. “I daresay I do not deserve any of the things that I want.”

Ren wets the fullness of his bottom lip.

Hux drops his priceless antique lens onto the ground. 

“You have been…bathing,” he frowns. 

“Yes,” Ren shrugs. “I had hoped to make my company less offensive to you.” His shoulders scintillate with drying sea-sugar. Hux aches to taste the grain of it. 

“You should be resting in the cool of your shuttle,” Ren continues. It is an accusation, and perhaps an apology for his own appearance, although he makes no move to cover his indecency. “It is too fierce a heat for you, out here.” His tone lowers again. “You are so very fair. I sometimes fear that the cold starlight itself might scald you.” 

Hux wishes for his flask. 

“My comfort is irrelevant.” He shakes his head, but it does no good. “I need this latest…folly to be done with.”

“Snoke…”

“…would have us duelling over some demented mansion that he may well intend to brick you up in.” Hux glares at the fine lines of Ren’s body. It is dizzying. Perfect. “We have been set upon a course for failure, Ren, for which we will then be barely forgiven.”

He gestures, between them both, and is irrationally happy at the inclusivity of his despair. 

“I am no longer an engineer, any more than you are still a prince.” 

“And would you put me in silks, General?” 

Hux ceases to breathe. 

Mistaking the silence for pity, Ren blushes, and slides a palm up to cover his latest blotching of bruises, the ugliness which Snoke uses to brand him a _disappointment_. 

“I am merely surprised at your misgivings; you build destruction so beautifully,” Ren praises, bitterly. “Do you not yearn to oversee mine?” 

They are close together.

Then they are very close together.

“Ren. You surely know…that I do not,” Hux sighs. He is too exhausted, and too sick of endless apprehension, and too captivated, not to be honest. “What I yearn for, apart from having you in my bed, covering you with my hands and my mouth, hearing you call out my name as I bring you pleasure, is your _rightful ascension_.” 

The breeze carries with it the perfume of the shore’s abundant ribbonherb.

Pride and adoration make Ren _molten_.

He reaches for Hux, and they kiss, because they must.

Hux cannot recall the etiquette of it; he is clumsy in his unbuckled passion. 

Ren has never had the opportunity to learn; he is hesitant, at first, made overgentle by the wonder that he can hold something so very pretty between his rough, slaughtering hands. 

They continue, mouths hot and open; unpractised, and insecure, and desperate, and animal. 

Hux wrings the ocean from Ren’s hair with his fists. He cannot bring himself to do more, yet; he is shaking apart as it is, with Ren, unclothed, so near, his cock pressed insistently against him. 

Ren tugs Hux’s collar until it gapes wide and he pushes his face between the damp material, scraping his teeth reverently from neck to chest, sucking on tendon and bone. He inhales. His tongue laps at any sweat he finds. He mutters words about sweetness. About worship. About love. 

“Yes.” Hux tells him. His hips push forward. He would render worlds unto ash, for this.

Abruptly, sensing the fire in Hux’s mind, Ren brings his head up. 

He scowls with concern, as he runs his hands from Hux’s slender wrists to his elbows. He kisses Hux again, biting a little as he scolds. 

“It is you who is burning.”

“Yes.” Hux repeats, helplessly. 

They pull one another over to a stand of tall foliage. 

The high umbrellas of blue petals cast a shuddering shade below, a deep grey softness for them to lie in, amid the rattling weeds.


	3. Chapter 3

“This is a mistake.” Hux tells Ren, but he kneels all the same. 

For once, Ren does not argue, he just pulls the General’s shirt off, over his head, making of his bright hair a crown. 

The glassy meadow beyond their shelter crackles as the heat builds; the General is haloed by the yellow sunflare that bleeds under the leaves. 

Ren _swells_ to see Hux stripped, yet still so predatory, so haughty, so pristine, in his shining dog tags and half a uniform. 

They kiss. It is softer, yet more possessive, now. Rens licks in hungrily. Hux remembers how to tease. 

“But, not having you is destroying me.” Hux continues, tucking a curl back, solemnly, behind Ren’s ear. He muses, matter-of-fact. “I am dying for lack of you, my lord.”

Ren’s eyes darken at the very thought. He pulls Hux down into the dirt, cupping Hux’s narrow hips tightly against his own, so that he can circle and buck and make Hux _curse_ him. 

“Nothing will take you from me. I would slay death itself to keep you.” Ren turns his head and noses beneath Hux’s bicep. It is so intimate, so dear a privilege to find his cool, clean co-commander, his pale angel of war, so slick with sweat, that Ren bites blissfully into the muscle. 

Hux hisses, and trails a reciprocating fingernail from Ren’s jaw to his nipple. 

“Here?” Hux asks, pinching once, and watching Ren through a cage of gold. “Shall I suck you, here?” 

Ren grinds his head into the base of the bole. “Do what you want with me. I am yours, if you will but claim me.”

The bruises, the clawings of Snoke are sanctified by Hux’s clever tongue. Ren is still honeyed from the waves, and Hux is _greedy_. 

He has seen Ren fight, and he kisses and kisses, that which has killed, and killed, and killed. 

Ren scratches mindlessly at Hux’s scalp, hurting where he was already scorched. Hux mutters affectionate insults, and is driven lower still.

Ren digs into the scrub with his heels, legs falling open. 

Ripple of rib. 

Smooth belly.

A territory that Hux has long wished to enslave. Or maybe, he thinks, this can be their _liberation_.

“Each time I berate you, on the bridge,” Hux slides Ren’s weight between his fingers, “when I carp and criticise. What I truly crave is to take down your britches and have you make better use of my awful mouth.”

Ren makes a noise of desire. 

“I have dreamt of your prick in me, Kylo, in every way.” Hux confesses, lapping up the syrup at the head.

And there is no oblivion like it, no drug as marvellous, in any of his doses and needles. He recognises the beginning of a new addiction, and grips Ren steady in his wetted fist. 

Ren’s body begs, and Hux allows him in, so stiff, and sweet from the sea. 

“Can you take more?” Ren leans up on his elbows, to look. 

Hux nods. His eyes fill with venom, green and sharp.

“You are so tight, so neat around me.” Ren grunts, as he fucks further and further into Hux’s throat.

Hux stops swallowing so that he can rub his spittle down into Ren, one slippery finger piercing him in one punishing push.

Ren moans Hux’s first name.

The General can scarcely recollect the mechanics of it, but he draws back and thrusts, again and again, deeper and deeper, while Ren chokes him from the inside out. 

Ren is struggling, now. Tensing the trembling structure of his body against the battering assaults of pleasure. 

“I...it is...You must stop.” 

“No.” The General raises his head. His voice is cold. His smile is an especially severe and wicked one. “I would not waste a drop of you, you are too rare a thing.”

And he sets his mind to give Ren a gift, a flow of images, of how it could be between them.

Of how it _is_.

Equal. Consort. Mate.

Ren flushes a darker red.

Hux takes Ren with a second finger, and lowers his head once more, diligently devouring the man intended to be his downfall.

“I am not _his_ , not any more,” Ren vows, in a broken whisper, as if Snoke can scent their sin, and their treachery, even from his far-off citadel. 

Ren pants. Strokes Hux along his lean face, framed by damp spikes of amber. His slender neck. 

“Armitage…Listen to me,” Ren pleads, “from this moment on, I am none…but yours.”

And with this promise between them, and many others that are just as dangerous, Ren comes. 

Hux is dainty, afterwards. He sits back on his heels. Licks his raw lips and kisses Ren again, primly. Then, as Ren welcomes his own flavour, not primly at all. 

Neither one can imagine tiring of _this_.

“You. I want to…” Ren hesitates in reaching for Hux; Ren is splayed out, ungainly, as he always is, and shivering with sensation.

He is fragmented and damaged. Oafish and graceless. He will, no doubt, fail to please. “If you would let me try…”

“Try?” Hux actually _laughs_. Amused, but also implacably angry. 

“My lovely idiot. I would murder whoever it was filled your head with such wrong notions. You are dauntless, and beautiful. You have ruined me already with a single kiss, ferocious, stubborn creature that you are. When you have finally fucked me, and spilled yourself in me, I fear that my fate will rest entirely in your big, strong hands.” 

He starts to kiss Ren again, like a cadet, eager and fumbling. 

And Ren feels himself stir again, watching as Hux huffs impatiently over his own trouser buttons. 

“Now. Will you help me off with these bloody boots, or not?”


	4. Chapter 4

Hux wakes, Ren’s arm a sash of victory silk across his chest. 

The blanket prickles against bite-marks and finger-bruises; let these be now his new insignia.

He finds that he is sore, bloody. Stinking with sweat and seed. 

He finds that he is content beyond all reckoning.

And sober.

The sky is a strange, soft indigo above the clearing, the fading lunar refractions putting spangles across the void that Hux has always regarded as his place of work, his domicile; an extension of his own prized capacity to remain empty, and unknowable. 

But now, there is Ren, kissing across the wing of one shoulder blade. 

Insanely slowly. 

Ren exposes Hux to the moonglow, which makes of their skin such warm ice.

He starts to stroke Hux’s cock, inexpertly, tugging at the coarse hair between Hux’s legs. Rubbing at the slit, at the hot, smooth, ridges. 

“I want to make you come again,” Ren spits into his palm, which is calloused, from the holding of so much death. “Like this.”

Hux spreads himself, his body a traitor to his position, his pride, his prestige. 

“You _witch_ ,” he grumbles. “Which of your dark tricks do you use, to make me ache for you this way?”

“This is none of my power.” Ren reddens, awkward face pressed close. “Will you watch?” 

Hux does as he’s ordered. 

They breathe together as Ren slides his fingers, tightly ringed, down, and then up, turning his wrist so that Hux fills and thickens _shamelessly_.

He gives grave consideration as to whether he could take another fucking. 

“I would make no objection,” Ren answers, humility in conflict with hunger. 

Hux frowns. 

“Your thoughts are unusually lambent,” Ren is rueful in his apology, “and I am unusually tired.”

Hux turns his head to find Ren’s mouth. 

He has never before felt quite so forgiving. 

“Well, in terms of strategy,” he concedes, eventually, reaching for whatever oil they have left, “a certain _sensitivity_ between us has its merits. There are eyes which must be kept blind…” 

They both stop.

They are behaving like co-conspirators. In a war they have dared not declare, even in all of their passion.

Hux gets to his feet. 

Disciplines himself not to shiver, outside of Ren’s ardour.

The fire is all but dead. The embers throb in the breeze, unattended. 

He has not the faintest idea what to do to take away the sudden chill.

“Snoke will be demanding an audience.” The name rises, miasmic, between them. 

There is another silence.

Hux does not add that his return to the Fleet will be anticipated, whilst Ren’s absence is no doubt _rejoiced_.

“These must remain here.” Hux distracts himself with the honeycomb case of unused architectural scrolls. “The cylinders are from an age…”

“…before assisted acceleration.” Ren unfolds himself from their bed. “I know this, General Hux. I know how easily things break. And I do not expect you to recall, but I once told you of my childhood tutors. That they were all guild scholars, forever maundering on about old Imperial customs.”

Hux, having no cuffs to straighten, simply stands there. 

Ren picks through the wreckage they have made of the camp. His shoulders are hunched.

“Tradition prohibits the duplication of the scrolls,” he recites, beginning to clothe himself in his bleak, black things, each movement a resignation. “For a time, they are held to be irreplaceable. Singular.”

His face is turned away, but Hux can hear exactly what he is saying. “Then, when their usefulness is over, they are ritually discarded, by the very hands that gave them purpose.”

The edge of the shuttle silvers, as the sun reaches the top of the trees. 

Hux nods. Snaps shut the case. He should be leaving.

He goes to Ren instead.

There are more masks than those made of metal. And they are worn as much for protection as intimidation.

“I remember every conversation, my lord,” he takes the tunic from Ren’s grip, and lets it fall to the ground. “Where we did not brutalise, or sneer.” He kisses Ren. “And also those where we did.”

Ren digs his nails into Hux’s shoulders. “I cannot fathom that you want _me_.”

“Then you are indeed the dolt you pretend to be.” Hux runs both palms up Ren’s flanks, then his ribs, until Ren’s breathing changes. “Do you think my favour is so easily won, by dark eyes, and a pretty mouth?”

He glances over at his prissy measuring prisms. “Excuse my extravagance, Kylo.” He shrugs, puzzled, resistless against whatever this is. “Perhaps I thought to court you with authenticity.”

Ren pulls them back into the tangle of bedding. “I know we will not be allowed _that_.”

“No.” Hux rests astride the knight, so that they can be suitably aligned. He deliberately pours out the last of the bottle over them both. His eyes glitter. Their skin gleams. “But, in private, we could attempt honesty.” 

The slip of it, as they circle one another, makes them both arch.

Power and control. Together. A rise. A fall. Tendon and muscle. 

“I think of little else, besides you. How can… _this_ …be concealed from our enemy?” Hux angles Ren’s face in his other hand and takes his mouth, bitterly, because it is likely as much their end as their beginning. “Have I made of myself a weapon, Kylo? With which _he_ can cut you?”

Ren uses his hips to quicken their pace. 

“I am stronger than he knows. As I let you in, so I can keep him out.”

Hux looks to the faint stars. Ren looks to Hux.

They come until they shake. Ren licks their fingers clean. Hux watches. And then he helps. 

 

The ocean is cold, abrasive. They scrub each other without speaking.

When daybreak starts to stir the larger raptors beyond the reef, they wade back up to their meadow. 

Hux salvages his uniform. 

The shuttle shines offensively against the spires and cascades of green. It is, Hux decides, too clean. Sobriety has polished the lens of him, and much of what he sees clearly, he does not like. 

“Here.” Ren offers Hux the forgotten flask. He has been getting in Hux’s way the whole time. Colliding with him. Interfering. Putting his arms about Hux’s waist. 

“No. I do not require…”

“You should.” Ren states, flatly. “Our Leader has often complained of the…medications you employ. Spirits. Stimulants. The chemicals that you use to replace sleep and food.”

Hux bristles. “My performance…”

“…is exemplary. So, he has not punished you for it.” Ren uncorks the stopper. “But it is a veil to him, Armitage. He does not admit it, but he cannot reach you so easily, through the fog.”

Ren is regretful. 

Hux takes a drink. 

It occurs to him that, for the first time in his life, he is afraid. Because, once, his service was of more consequence than his existence. Now, Ren's existence is the only thing worth dying for.

The taste is acid on his tongue.

“Sit. Please.”

Hux sits.

The rendezvous destroyer is just visible, between the white lace circles of the planet’s moons.

“Return quickly,” Ren says, quietly, "I beg of you." He throws the blanket over them. 

And it seems to be an acceptable way to pass the time, to be there, side-by-side. 

Holding hands, as they wait.


	5. Chapter 5

Hux looks the insurgent in all of her eyes and knows that the interrogation will be a dreary business.

He is a ghost, in reflection. 

Waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

He has been receiving reports, mandates, transcripts, requisitions, treaties, communiqués. But what he wants to receive, he does not. 

Ren has been silent in every possible way. Marooned in meditation, or having recovered from whatever madness had begun between them. 

Hux knows not how to _miss_ , only how to be meritorious; he becomes inhumanly so. 

Snoke smiles upon him because of it, ghastly and distant. His whisper stalks the corridors; if Thorendd doesn’t get his old grey muzzle into the throats of his mutinous captains soon, then command of the _Great Inspiritor_ itself will be for Armitage Hux to simply reach out and take. 

Blood slides down the wall. The anarchist _breaks_. 

Hux is as a hammer, dreaming of slender cylinders of priceless architectural vitreneon. 

He wipes his brow. It is damp, despite the cold economy of his technique. His hand shakes, and the steriliser startles him as it begins to bleach the soiled air. 

He cannot leave the constriction of the cell quickly enough. 

He cannot _breathe_ these last few shifts, without feeling an ocean or a forest filling up his entire body; without remembering the sweet, tingling salt of Ren. The tart, hot sap. 

It may be that he will never taste those things again. 

“Useful enough intelligence.” He hands off the recording device, to have the screams tidied out of it. “I will arrange for the necessary assassinations.” 

The insides of his arms itch, and he resolves to use an alternative artery when his next dose is due. 

“And exquisitely done, if I might say.” The assisting officer is an admirer. 

Hux is brimming with an obscure, overwhelming misery. He does not slow his stride, lest he trip over the series of compliments which are being scattered before him. 

“You have time to refresh yourself, sir, before you depart for the trade assembly…”

“No.” Hux tries to recall where his Leader would have him go this day. If it is somewhere different from the day before. “I have yet another sanction programme to revoke. Clearly, in some dominions, only my boot-heel will do.”

“You honour them,” the young man ventures, huskily, and his glove brushes Hux’s sleeve. “If these scum but knew they had your…personal attention...”

Hux stops in the middle of the corridor. 

“And how typical of Snoke’s lapdog to absent himself, on some mystical nonsense or other, at this time. His manner of savagery would be quite suitable for carrying out all punitive actions, do you not agree, my General?” 

The dead quiet is, in some way, encouraging.

“Privately, we all share your opinion, and know that you regard Ren as a brute and a nuisance. But what a useful, expendable beast he must sometimes be, when harnessed and pricked correctly.”

“Yes.” Hux turns. Sees how his sharp scrutiny causes the golden curve of the officer’s cheek to pink. 

He has eyes of violet-blue. 

And he speaks well; a fellow academician, similarly seduced by the military. 

The Adjutant needs a favour, Hux guesses, to have put something so patently delicious at Hux’s disposal. 

“Yes,” he repeats, and it _hurts_. “A freakish, unstable creature. Something to scare the cadets with.”

They go onto the bridge.

Where the monster himself stands. Unannounced. 

Ren is rigid. And yet _not_. 

The material of the floor and the walls tremble around him. Minutely, but even so.

The crew are, conversely, immobile. Not frozen by the Force, but by fear of it.

“General Hux,” Ren spits, facepiece both projecting and distorting. “It is here that you hide yourself away.” 

“Where else,” Hux replies, tonelessly, “would you have me, my lord?” 

And only two of the last four letters he says out loud are the right ones.


	6. Chapter 6

Lightning hisses through the room at random, cratering the walls. 

Hux sees his own loneliness in it; the desperation, the reaching out. The way that eventual _contact_ leaves only damage behind. 

“You know where you should be.” The dark voice answers, sharpened through circuitry, nearly enough to wound, and oh, how Hux wants to be opened again, for Ren. To feel the sting of him again. To surrender his very skin again. 

But spirals of smoke are beginning to rise from the surrounding consoles. 

“I must insist…”

“Can your crew not conn one small destroyer, without their hero holding them by the hand?” Ren says this strangely, turning his head towards the young man at Hux’s shoulder. 

“You speak to me of protocol?” Hux snaps. “When I have had no communication from you these past days? Although I have been assured, too many times to count, that we have been in full transmission range.”

Ren makes a fist. The ceiling cracks, and it begins to snow sparks across the grey desert of the deck. 

“Was our… _work_ …so disagreeable, General, that only a _command_ to return would bring you back to it?” 

A stack of datascreens skids off the navigation station, the scattering flock striking metal and men alike. There is noise, and the smell of blood, and burning.

Hux looks only at Ren. Nothing else is of concern. 

“I may be…accustomed to the…security…of a direct order,” Hux says, unused to admitting to a flaw, and even less used to requiring forgiveness for it. “And, as _I_ cannot read minds, would you inform me, plainly, that I am…still _needed,_ by you, in this…endeavour?”

Everything stops. The screens that are still in flight fall like stones. 

“Hux,” Ren says slowly, “you are the _only_ necessity.” 

The knight steps over a shattered projector.

But he does not go to Hux.

He goes to the assisting officer. 

And stands there.

Ren does not have to bludgeon his way very far inside before he finds it. The fantasy has red hair, slicked to the skull. It parades in lacings and straps. It smiles and shows its pucker. 

Yet the officer has omitted to imagine the blasterburn on Hux’s left hip, from the Clarik campaign, that Ren has kissed and called a star. 

He has failed to fully realise the true heaviness of Hux’s cock, as it thickens and grows ripe in Ren’s hand, such a glorious counterpoint to those long, lithe limbs. 

And Hux’s assistant clearly does not know, from either experience or intuition, the extent of the blush that fevers his General when he is being fucked, deeply and wantonly. How his chest glows with desire, and satisfaction, beneath Ren’s shadow, beneath the sheen of Ren’s falling sweat. The way Ren can drive that blush further, with his tongue, and his fingers, as if lighting a glacier on fire with his lust alone.

The room thrums, the energies of anger and relief blending beautifully together.

“Please.” The perfect blue eyes wince shut. The officer begins to back away. “Please. Do not…I…” 

His boots leave the ground. 

He coughs and sputters through his flower-bud of a mouth. 

Ren lifts Hux’s lieutenant even higher, by the neck. 

Breaks a pretty bone or two. And then throws him off somewhere. 

Hux remains silent. 

Adjusts his uniform.

Ren comes across and kneels down, right in front of him. 

Force lightning has fused a speck of grit, or dirt, something base, something of no value, into a blackly glittering gem. Ren picks it up.

“This happens but rarely.” He places the jewel into Hux’s palm. 

Hux clears his throat. Brushes at the spatter and cinders upon his jacket.

“I already have a rebel’s bile on me, and now I am all but carbonized.” He sounds furious. “I would suggest you come with me to continue your complaints, Lord Ren, while I make myself seemly.”

Lord Ren appears to acquiesce.

And they do not run to Hux’s quarters. 

But they do walk _very quickly_.


	7. Chapter 7

Ren tilts his head; the surveillance array shivers into fragments.

Snoke’s eye, for the time being, is shut.

Hux presses Ren back against the closing door. 

They are both becoming hard. 

Hux has been fractured into fear, anger, and brittle grief these last few days, and now is put back together, completed; an answering _pride_ and _adoration_ alloy through his veins, like solder. From this moment on, his faith will be as unbreakable as the Force gem in his fist.

All masks come off. 

They breathe again, into one another. 

Neither can speak. They cannot kiss. 

Ren takes his gloves off. Cloak. Tunic. Hux loosens Ren’s belt and pushes one hand down onto Ren’s cock. 

“Kylo…”

“I want to fuck you.” Ren interrupts, hoarsely. “Order me to fuck you.” 

Hux feels Ren fill for him, shifting his hips, uncertain. 

“Yes,” Hux tells him, “you must.”

He pulls them onto the floor. “You must take what belongs to you.”

Ren kicks off the rest of his things and crouches over Hux. 

Hux starts to move beneath him, begging for him with his body, and Ren wants to bellow like a beast.

The lights flicker. 

Hux runs his hands over sweat-damp skin. Power still prickles there, stinging and arcing in the near-dark. 

Ren dips his head and pulls down Hux’s collar and bites him on the neck. 

The bites bleed and chafe and Hux is _dizzy_ with it. 

“Will you open me up, my lord?” 

“A little.” Ren rubs himself against Hux’s rough, stained uniform. “Just a little.” 

His hair is nightfall, the death of light. Hux touches it, wonderingly. 

“I want you tight.” Ren’s voice stops and starts. “Will you let me have you, like I’m the first?” 

Ren swallows. “Can I hurt you a little?”

“Yes.” Hux whispers. His eyes are dim, and glittering. 

Ren kneels behind him.

Hux reaches up to his desk for the oil. Flasks fall over, splintering around them. 

They pull only enough of Hux’s uniform down to uncover him, only enough so that Ren can get his fingers into him, wetted and possessive. Hux grounds himself with his shins on the floor. 

The blood of the ship pulses around the near-empty room. The engines fire, distantly. 

“Kylo,” Hux snaps out, taut as a wire. “That’ll do.”

“I love you.” Ren makes Hux take the head of his cock, holding him by the hips. Hux has a straight back. Ren has always coveted his spine, his mouth.

They both breathe again.

Ren rucks the uniform jacket further up, so that he can see everything he needs to.

He slides in deeper.

Hux grounds himself with his wrists on the floor.

“Don’t ever leave me again.” 

“I must. I will be made to.”

“I know.” 

“Yet I am your soldier now, Armitage. Only yours.”

Ren wants to be read by Hux, like the pages of his books, he wants to be present in his past, he wants to push his way into Hux’s drugged dreams, and meet himself there.  


Instead, he pulls out, slowly. And fucks back in.

Hux makes a noise. Ren grinds himself in deeper. His fingers are slipping so he uses his nails.

“Tell me how.”

“Go hard in me,” Hux says immediately. 

“I love you. When I kill, it will be in your name.”

_Anyone,_ he signals, silently. _No matter who they might be_. 

“Yes.”

Ren reaches around. The cloth of Hux’s regulation trousers scratches his wrist. Hux curses, safe in Ren’s grip, so greased, and owning.

Ren is at peace. Because Hux is _everything_. Swollen and wet, tight and wet. Cool of mind yet burning inside.

He holds Hux close to him as he comes. Hux spills onto cold metal.

Ren turns Hux to him, gently. They kiss.

And Hux commands, sated and steady, " _we_ must take what belongs to _us."_


	8. Chapter 8

The later of the Tric Empire blueprints are the most beautiful, the most brutal. Each one written in scars, on stretched, pale skins. 

Labyrinthine and exacting, the architectural designs raise auto-mechanical torture to an artform. 

Hux does not let distaste deter him. There will always be evolutions in cruelty.

The dust stirs heavily around the stacks and shelves of the library.

The light is late, and slanting.

The trade meeting on this neglected planet is over.

Hux has already robbed and extorted, with all due diplomacy, and the necessary agreements are in place, at negligible cost to the Order.

All he has left to steal are secrets; it is salvation itself which must now be abstracted.

A door opens. A flock of rockrats shuffles about, high in the rafters, disturbed. 

Hux makes ready to draw his blade as the steps echo closer.

“They call for you in the Halls, General. The very men whose ambitions you have just blunted clamour to fall and fawn at your feet.”

Hux floods with a dark joy to hear Ren, even after such a short spell apart; it spills over entirely, to hear him so sour, so jealous. 

“And so they should.” Hux does not deign to look up. “Come here.”

For a moment there is silence, then Ren moves up behind him.

Hux holds firm. 

“You were not instructed to attend these negotiations, my Lord Ren.”

His knight removes his mask. His breathing strokes behind Hux’s ear. 

“I am here…because I cannot be where you are not. Your absence is intolerable to me, now.” Ren touches a hand to Hux’s hip. “I want to be inside you.” 

Still Hux resists. 

He spurs Ren on with words colder than the stony archways around them. “Yes? And what do I get in return?”

“You shine when you look at the stars; hunger gleams from you. I would give you the galaxies you covet.”

“And what are stars without the darkness around them?” Hux murmurs. “Your will alone shall be the new darkness, binding and influencing all of our dominions.” 

Ren sighs towards that tempting, slender neck; Hux curses quietly at the sweet, desperate bite of Ren’s kisses. He could die from that mouth, his very heart consumed by soft lips and sharp teeth. 

The drawings are laid out on the carved slab of an old table, the one that Hux has chosen as most suitable put carefully aside.

Ren looks over Hux’s shoulder as he unbuttons him. 

His fingertips are starving, and they feed on his General’s collarbones, his nipples. 

“I know that you are accomplished, but do not tell me that you can read Tric?” Ren mocks, low and breathless. “Nobody can, surely. Not even our beloved Leader has that skill. The practices of those unholy architects were forbidden, then long ago forgotten.” 

Hux turns. “The last to understand their script was an elderly tutor at the Academy. I courted him so that he would teach me the language of it.”

Ren pauses, and Hux exults in the sharp prickle of his anger. 

“He had you?”

“He desired me. And I have always wanted to master what is most unique, what is the least understood.” Hux shrugs, looking up through his lashes, one shoulder falling bare. “We came to terms.”

Ren takes his gloves off, and begins tracing along Hux’s inner arm, all menace and ownership. 

Hux shivers.

“Do not plague me, Armitage. You would have silenced him, before he could take what he had been promised.”

Hux lifts the corner of his lips, slightly, wearily. 

“Indeed I did. My word meant very little, before the time I gave my pledge to you, Kylo.”

His skin is very pale. The puncture marks along his basilic vein all but connect; a constellation of contusions.

“You are increasing the doses.” Ren does not even frown, such is his concern. Hux cannot continue like this, drugging himself to keep Snoke’s prying intrusions at bay. “Are you certain that _he_ seeks me, in you?”

“He suspects that we are not as we once were,” Hux tells him. “I was informed today that he will attend us alone, upon the inauguration of your palace. That it will be a private ceremonial.”

So, this is it; they look at one another. 

The only thing which is now uncertain is which of them Snoke will murder, on that day. 

It is possible that he has not yet decided.

Ren slowly puts his hands to Hux’s face. 

“We must save ourselves.”

“In these plans,” Hux returns Ren’s gesture, palm to scarred cheek, “is a way.”

“There have been no Force Masons for ten generations.”

“This is our advantage. Snoke will not expect us to slay him with legend. Our purpose shall be to build as the Tric once built; a structure that itself is engineered to murder.”

“A trap?” 

“Not just a trap.” Hux kisses Ren’s mouth. “But also his _tomb_.” 

“Yes.” Ren mumbles, intoxicated. 

They are ungentle.

Ren seizes Hux by the hips and makes his needs known. 

Hux is flushed. “We have no time for this.”

Ren silences him. His tongue licks in and it is all Hux wants. 

The crumbling walls could shake to the ground, they would not care. They are desperate and their movements scrape and crash against one another.

Hux unlaces Ren’s tunic. 

Slides his hands underneath and Ren hisses with desire.

“Would you have me kneel, Lord Ren?” Hux hurries in his undoing. “Or do I bend for you?”

Then, as he pulls at Ren’s clothing, Hux glances up, and sees that his assisting officer is standing there, between two bookshelves.

The young man’s rosiness has blotched, has gone wrong.

He does not look so very pretty, now, when bleached and rouged with terror, at the treason he sees before him.


	9. Chapter 9

The assisting officer holds two flasks of whatever it is they drink in this gritty place. 

The door closes behind him. 

“General,” he says, staring. The tryst that is playing out before him is clearly not the one he had in mind. “You were missed. I took it upon myself to…find you.”

Ren holds Hux even more tightly, by the waist, thumbs pressing in. 

“And so you have.” Hux smooths along Ren’s lower ribs. There is an idleness to it, a familiarity. 

There can be no doubt as to where his allegiance lies. 

“I won’t…report…anything.” The assisting officer takes a step backwards. Then another. "I will not tell the Supreme Leader _anything_."

“No,” Hux says, blandly. “You will not.”

Ren has not once looked away from his General. There is, he is thinking, a little gold amid the green. He wonders who else has noticed this; who else has had the privilege of being able to notice.

“I will not be kind,” Ren decides, “as I scour his mind of all that he has seen here.”

“It may be enough.” Hux frowns, and tilts his head. “And yet, I do so tire of his constant pawing and innuendo, Kylo. I am spoken for, am I not?” 

Ren pauses, understanding a permission when he hears one. 

He nods, slowly. 

The assising officer does not have time to run. Or scream.

The rockrats keen and chatter as they smell the spill of blood; even as the charge of it electrifies the air, Hux grasps Ren fiercely, and uncovers the parts of themselves that are necessary for their task.

They spit into their hands. 

Ren pushes Hux back against the hard edge of a lectern. Hux complains, but takes Ren’s cock in a wet, possessive grip nonetheless. 

“I want to see you come.” Ren pants, sharply. “I want that uniform defiled with it.”

Hux tugs on a fistful of Ren’s hair.

“Then make me, my lord.” 

Ren is clumsy, frantic, he spits and spits again, his fingers rasping, long and none too clean. 

Hux realises, with a delicious helplessness, as Ren uses him roughly, that he will lose this challenge, that he will be borne away, again, by Ren’s inelegance and limitless strength, and knows that he will be always be glad to be so defeated.

“Kylo,” Hux grunts, as they shuffle and rut at one another. “One day I will bloody well have you bathed, and lay you out on silk, while I fuck you against a softness of pillows.”

Their scent is ripe in the dead air. 

“I need nothing but your comfort.” Ren looks down at their bodies.

The way their hands work towards pleasure’s end.

The way the friction makes them drip and shine.

The way Hux watches him, watching.

Sweating and ruined, Hux comes, and his dog tags clatter against the Force gem he wears on a chain around his neck. 

He brings his hand up to their lips. 

Back and forth, their ardour flows, tasted, shared, until Ren adds his own mess to that of his equal, his consort, his mate. 

The library is pitchy; they have no lamp.

They cool, then stumble about as they dress. 

Clean up any _rubbish_ they may have left lying around. 

Hux packs the Tric artefact into his case.

Scowls as Ren pinches him in passing; treason should not be a cause for joy.

Yet this thing called hope persists in them both; something as bright and enduring as the coloured transparency of a temple window.

Ren puts on his mask.

Hux straightens his jacket. Brushes back his hair. Conceals as much of his emotion as he can.

Ren seizes him suddenly, kissing Hux's mouth again, long and slow and promising.

Hux pushes Ren away, regretfully, and pauses with his hand on the library door.

He has a strange, sudden impression in his head; it is a skilful intrusion.

He sees a large, plain house. The materials of it are fine, he can tell, but the details of it are blurry, he has just a sense of space, and ease; the only clear part of this vision is the bed.

Laden with silks and pillows.

It is a place Hux has yet to know, for his existence has always been sheathed about in steel, yet already he thinks they should call it _home_.

Ren looks away slyly, and smiles.

“Behave yourself, Ren,” Hux scolds. “And keep about our business; there is death to be dealt out before we can dream.”

But the house remains in Hux’s head. Austere, yet grand. 

Fit for the two Emperors of the First Order.

"I will expect you after the completion of your duties, General."

"If I can spare the time." Hux tells him. 

And so it begins, the construction of a downfall, and the elevation of love.


End file.
